Fuzzy reliability in conceptual design

A fuzzy approach to reliability estimation of mobile agent-based systems

“…Fuzzy set theory was introduced by L. Zadeh, as a new paradigm, which deals with certain types of uncertainty [3,4,17]. In the area of performance reliability, a number of performance issues must be addressed and investigated deeply using fuzzy set theory due to the characteristic of these problems.…”

“…Assume that we have a shortage of information regarding the environment of the mobile agent-based system, in other words, the amount of information observed about the network is less than the total information [17]. This shortage of information is related to the failure rates of the communication links and processors (edges and vertices).…”

“…The uncertainty about failure rates force us to switch to another paradigm that deal with such kind of problem. It is the fuzzy reliability approach [3,4,6,11,17,20]. Uncertainty in this context leads to a possibility of a false estimation for the required reliability.…”

“…9. The failure rates of the processors and communication links are unknown, or are not know specifically due to several reasons: (i) Hardware components are in design phase, and limited data is available [3,17]; (ii) Error in recording or collecting data (human or machine errors); and (iii) Unexpected situations [20]. …”

“…To estimate (1) under assumption (9), and to avoid any false estimation, we used the fuzzy reliability approach [3,4,6,11,17,20] instead of conventional reliability. The following sections illustrate the solution.…”